


in a better world than this

by tigrrmilk



Category: Magic for Beginners (short story) - Kelly Link
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:49:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course, more people watched the show on DVD than had ever bothered tuning in to watch it (on a Friday night, of all nights?). The fans became insufferable - unless you were one of them, and unless your friends were the right sort of fans. “You can’t stop the signal”, as another group said.</p>
<p>But the problem with network television is that you very well can stop the signal.</p>
<p>Except when you can't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in a better world than this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluestalking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestalking/gifts).



> the title is from as you like it, because i'm a knob.

 

The Library was cancelled by the television network at the end of the second series, which is how these things often go. The last shots were of Jeremy’s face as the viewers heard the fuzz of the screen that he was facing.

The fuzz cut out a second before the episode ended, and was replaced by - what?

Of course, more people watched the show on DVD than had ever bothered tuning in to watch it (on a Friday night, of all nights?). The fans became insufferable - unless you were one of them, and unless your friends were the right sort of fans. “You can’t stop the signal”, as another group said.

But the problem with network television is that you very well can stop the signal.

People wrote fanfiction and short little ideas for the future of The Library on tumblr, and people talked about it in interviews when they were asked about shows that were cancelled too early (it was up there somewhere between Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared in posthumous popularity, but tv geeks loved it more than anybody else so it got mentioned in magazines and blogs more than maybe all of the other late greats, except probably Firefly itself).

But sometimes, these things have a way of coming around again. The network had never been top (not enough old people solving crimes or whatever it is that people actually enjoy watching on Friday nights) but it started to seem like it was stuck in a terminal decline.

When the new Netflix competitor - EyesSquared or whatever, look, let’s just get on with it - made an attractive bid for the rights to the show, and already had the old showrunner on board and half of the original writing staff - it seemed like a no-brainer. But by the time they’d reassembled most of the cast (Amy wasn’t returning; neither was Karl, or the vampire, although the twin brother of the actor who’d originally played Karl seemed pretty keen) the show-runner had had a big blow-up fight with the founder of the streaming website and was pretty much out, although he still got some money and his name pretty high up in the credits.

Nobody was quite sure that it was ever going to happen, and a lot of people kind of thought that maybe it was for the best. People liked imagining how Fox could have survived and people liked thinking about how The Library and the show called The Library were about to collapse together and become the same thing (and people liked talking about how exciting it was that the actual show was named after the show within it, it’s like if Daria had actually been called Sad Sick World, which is what you know Daria would have wanted to call it, but this was the nerdiest of the key discussions), but it was hard to imagine how network television could have pulled it off.

So most of the reviews of the show in magazines and the synopses on websites like thefutoncritic focused all the Wonder Years / Boy Meets World stuff that was constantly going on – it would mention whether Karl and Jeremy were talking and whether Talis was talking to anyone, maybe, and it would definitely mention whatever was happening with Jeremy’s mother as she was a little bit Lorelai Gilmore and people, you may be surprised to hear, quite like Lorelai Gilmore.

But enough of the 12-page Television Without Pity snoozefest. 

When The Library came back, it was 6 years after it had last been on air, and it had existed in that time as wishing alone (and youtube clips that the network had stopped taking down, and cheap DVDs, and you get the idea).

 But in the world of The Library, only 4 years had passed, and Jeremy was 19, the last frontier before his heart would die or whatever. 

 

**3\. 1. “College Girls”.**

 

Jeremy’s bedroom looks like most college bedrooms. There are two beds and a couple of small bookcases and desks, etc. But Jeremy’s managed to cram a tv in there - and not a big flatscreen monster, but a small secondhand one with a bulbous screen. 

The signal went blank while Jeremy was in Las Vegas. You find this out pretty early on in the episode, because he’s on the phone to Talis (“IMPLAUSIBLE FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS”, an early review says) and one of them mentions how “the signal stopped”. They don’t talk about much else but you get the feeling that we’ll find out that something has happened there. This is because Jeremy gets very jittery while talking to Talis. He’s usually thinking about kissing her. He touches the side of his mouth.

Jeremy doesn’t talk to Elizabeth in this episode but there’s a scene with her in. She doesn’t talk, but she’s walking through a library somewhere. A lot of the chairs are upturned and half of the shelves are empty. The camera doesn’t move - it’s just one unbroken wide shot of Elizabeth, who picks up books from the floor, who walks in and out without a glance. But it’s definitely her.

Nobody mentions Karl.

The episode ends on a voiceover from Jeremy’s father, reading out a page from one of his novels. It doesn’t mention Jeremy and nobody dies. The last shot is Jeremy’s mother, who now looks a bit like the goth from the last episode of The Library before it got cancelled, reaching for a book on the top shelf as his voice fades out. 

Originally all of the episodes were going to go out at once but in the end they release one a week and it gets picked up by various cable channels too. It feels weird for a program like The Library to be digital-first.

But the thing is, although Jeremy’s tv is usually on an empty channel while he’s doing other stuff, he doesn’t seem to spend much time surfing/searching through the noise. As far as Jeremy is concerned, The Library is dead.

 

**3\. 2. “Postcards from...”**

The original series of The Library was mostly Jeremy’s story. But this episode starts with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth has not stopped the search. When she’s at home - eating a big pan of roast vegetables from the pan because they were cut-price, drinking tea, writing essays (she’s supposed to be at college, probably), she’s always got one hand or elbow – scanning. 

There’s something of the vigilante listening to the cop radio of Elizabeth, and once again the viewers are basically told that some shit has gone down as these people have grown up, as you’d expect.

Jeremy writes television recaps for a website that isn’t quite The AV Club but that’s clearly the dream. He can pare a good sentence down and is quite funny.

Jeremy lies in his bed at night and uses a book light to write a long letter to Elizabeth. He asks where they went wrong, asks why she won’t give him her number, etc.

The screen wipes. Elizabeth rubs her eyes and gets out of bed.

The screen wipes. Elizabeth rubs her face and gets out of bed.

The screen wipes. Elizabeth covers her eyes and gets out of bed.

The screen jumps. Elizabeth wipes her eyes and sits up in bed.

The picture loops over and over, and Elizabeth changes only very slightly. When she leaves the room we cut back to her waking up again. It is either a loop or it is a succession of mornings. It must be the latter. Not much is happening, but the room gets darker as the footage speeds up. 

But then, Elizabeth is not there. She is already awake.

It’s not fair that Jeremy gets to write the recaps. It was always Elizabeth who was the most organised and diligent. Elizabeth packs a lunch of winter vegetables and bread and three heavy books and it’s raining outside and she lives alone and there is nobody on the street either. The camera stays with her this time and she city she’s in doesn’t look like any city does, not really. It’s like a set - like the studio backlots they filmed big musicals on in the midcentury. But she keeps walking and there’s no visible cut and the sound of her feet vanishes into the rain and there’s no singing.

When Elizabeth put the books in her bag her hand was covering their titles and there were no fun pictures on the dust jackets.

  

**3\. 3. “It’s Talis calling...”**

 

“IT’S ALL WRONG” all the fanboys are ready to scream, but Talis is only calling because Elizabeth isn’t. She speaks like she’s been crying.

She reads out the channel number from where she is (where is she? We only see her room. Her roommate is on her side, texting in bed, and we can’t see her face) and Jeremy, who’s lying on his back, immediately starts thumbing down, then up again.

Is Talis the only one of them with a roommate? What happened to Amy, anyway?

We see half of Jeremy’s tv screen as he finds the Library, and then promptly swears (or the network equivalent) as he loses it again. But then he has it back up, and the camera zooms in and now Jeremy’s screen fills our screen, is our screen, the only screen there is.

Fox is there but her back is turned. She is very close to the camera and some wisps of her hair seem stuck to the inside of the screen (the front of the lens, remember) with static. Faithful Margaret is reading out a story about magical animals in a forest as she walks back and forth in the middle distance. As she reads, the creatures she names run underfoot.

Why doesn’t Fox look at the camera?

The Library inside The Library is shot in lower quality - “it adds a warm, authentic feel”, as somebody wrote in an article meant to introduce new viewers to the show before season 3 premiered.

Of course, if you think about it, Elizabeth in the rain looked an awful lot like old tape too.

Fox runs a hand through her hair and steps forward. Her green t-shirt has ridden up slightly at the back, and she is leaning on a sword. It’s rusty and looks like it’d kill you with tetanus before anything else.

We still can’t see her face. Her hair is long and the bottom is mottled pink, which fades to black as it goes up towards her roots. 

Faithful Margaret can’t stop reading, although she’s stumbling over her words. The creatures had started out like little more than glitches, but they’re growing bigger. They’re books, we realise just before Jeremy realises, and we hear him breathe in although we’re still looking past him, looking directly at the screen.

Margaret dodges paperbacks and their harmless softback teeth, and Margaret steps on pamphlets and thick leaflets. 

Fox shifts and starts pushing the bigger books away with the sword - she’s not touching them, and the books shudder unhappily when the sword does. They want her to touch them. Margaret is wearing thick socks but her hands are bare, and the book she holds has a collapsed spine. She is all that is keeping it together. It squirms as she reads, it sinks into her.

Fox is all the defence that Margaret has. Where’s Wing?

Where are the librarians?

Fox turns to swing her sword at a big, plush chair that has started slithering towards them. A fight breaks out. The camera moves with Fox and we never see her face.

Another chair.

A very big book. Some forbidden books. Fox fights and all the while we can hear Margaret, and what she is reading is nonsense and frightening and soothing.

“In this dream,” Margaret says, “the soup is cold and we sleep in it.” 

Fox swings and cuts through the plush cover on a chair. The chair stops moving.

“but there is something that has sunk to the bottom of the bowl,” Margaret says, “and it is doing its best to rise again.”

Fox is now fighting a sofa. It’s covered in a cute pastel pattern of hardback books and pencils and notebooks and it’s quite funny but also scary. Fox has been moving slowly all episode and the sofa seems to be... quicker, somehow.

“In this dream,” Margaret starts again. The book is like somebody trying to remember one particular sentence and always missing it.

Fox turns around as she swings, her whole body weight behind the blow. The sofa is severed, two heads, and it creaks.

The camera doesn’t move. Fox’s hair is in her face. She pushes it back and Fox is Elizabeth. Has she always been Elizabeth? 

  

**3\. 4. “Dreams”**

 

The episode starts up where the previous one left, but this time we can see the box around the television screen. Colourful lines move across the picture - this is what happens when you film a tv, instead of just showing the video that it’s showing.

We see Fox’s face, frozen, but then the lights go out. They come back and Fox is still Elizabeth; but suddenly Fox is Karl.

There is a weird rash on Karl’s jaw.

Margaret’s looping now; the loop is very small. All she says is “– this dream –”

Is Jeremy still on the phone to Talis? Is this Jeremy’s tv?

Fox knocks the book out of Margaret’s hand and it falls to pieces on the floor.

Fox knocks Margaret to the ground and nuzzles, and convulses, and then sits up, staring out. The Library behind her fades to pink, then yellow, then red. 

Fox is not in the library at all.

The screen is noise, and Fox is gone. Talis skips channels instinctively; like the books chased Margaret, she is chasing The Library down. She holds the phone with her face, and we hear Jeremy breathing. 

Talis’s roommate rolls over on her bed and asks her if she’s done.

Talis’s roommate looks a lot like Margaret, but she isn’t, people generally think, because her cheeks are slightly fuller and her ears are pointy.

“I still think about the times we kissed,” Jeremy says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Talis scrunches her face a bit. The camera never focuses in enough for us to read what her t-shirt says.

“Well, the last time, anyway.”

If Elizabeth was here or if she had a phone, Jeremy would call her. She’d be better to talk to about it.

But Elizabeth was Fox, and what the fuck is that about?

Jeremy is in bed, and he’s sleeping. Jeremy dreams about Fox - this time played by an actor who usually plays one of the minor librarians - who is dead, but not quite. Fox, who looks him in the eye and says, “Jeremy, I am trying to get back. There is a lot that I still have to do. You understand, don’t you?”

Her voice is tickly.

“Where did you go?” Jeremy says, holding her wrist. It’s all wrong and this should be Elizabeth’s dream.

 

**3\. 5. “Dreams pt.2”**

 

“I don’t have time for this,” Fox says, “I need more from you.”

Jeremy is still holding Fox’s wrist. It’s warm.

Jeremy wakes up and brushes his teeth and showers and eats breakfast and lunch and dinner and texts Talis and texts Karl (is he back now?) and writes a postcard to Elizabeth and watches a stupid procedural show and recaps it (and searches all of the other channels during the commercials) and goes to a friend’s house for a party where he drinks some lukewarm beer from a keg and sleeps on the floor.

 

**3\. 6. “Close the Books”**

 

Jeremy becomes increasingly worried about Elizabeth’s lack of contact. Meanwhile, Talis discovers her mother found an old episode of The Library that she didn’t know about, on THE LIBRARY.

 

**3\. 7. “Like the palm of my hand...”**

“So she didn’t record it,” Jeremy says, waving his fingers in the air like he’s twirling a phone cord.

We don’t hear Talis’s reply.

We see Talis’s dreams. Jeremy meets Fox, and punches her. Jeremy meets Fox, and is punched by her. It’s not fair that Talis doesn’t get to meet Fox, but she wouldn’t know how to.

Or would she?

Talis dreams of Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret. Amy’s crush on Prince Wing has flipped and Talis can’t stop thinking about Faithful Margaret, while Wing sits by himself through all of the dreams. He starts to appear in the Fox dreams, always trying to tell her something while Fox asks Jeremy for help, tapping on his side of the screen –

but Talis doesn’t like Wing and doesn’t want to listen.

The dreams are animated, but they animate Fox’s face differently every time. Wing and Margaret are the same always. They have always been clay. They have always been human.

 

**8\. “Talis gets a christmas present”**

 

We see a close-up on Talis’s mother wrapping a VHS tape.

We see Talis unwrapping the present and there is Christmas confetti in her hair. 

It’s old - it looks like the shows did 6 years ago, 7 years ago. Before Fox died. They use magic candles to thwart a plot dreamed up by the forbidden books. They put small books in a new terrarium that has sprouted on the 1st floor of the library, and hope that a new library will grow within it. Prince Wing tries to tell Margaret something but she is kissing one of the new librarians who has sprouted from the terrarium, with grass in her hair and a noticeable stammer.

Talis phones up Elizabeth’s house, and Elizabeth answers. They talk about what dicks boys are, and Elizabeth comes over to watch the tape. They phone Jeremy, Karl, and Amy, and they all come over. Amy looks the same, and Karl’s face is clean.

The episode is fun but there are no theories. They revert to eating ice cream and talking about the last episode. The latest episode.

But Fox was Elizabeth and Karl, and what the fuck was that? None of them mention it, as if it would be rude to. Or like they’ve forgotten. But then Amy can’t keep anything inside and she says IT WAS YOU, IT WAS YOU, WHAT’S THAT ABOUT? and Elizabeth doesn’t say anything and Karl says I don’t know what happened I don’t think it was me but he did look really similar.

And Elizabeth doesn’t say anything but she cries and says she doesn’t know what to do.

And Elizabeth remembers knowing exactly what needed to be done.

It’s not fair because it should be Jeremy crying, Elizabeth always knew what to do before. They fall asleep together on Talis’s sofa and Elizabeth’s long pink hair falls into Jeremy’s eyes. When he dreams, Fox holds his wrist.

“It’s time,” she says, orange dirt smeared on her legs and face. Jeremy doesn’t know what she wants, but he doesn’t break the contact.

“We’re going back in,” she says, and Jeremy realises, suddenly, where they are. He looks up. Fox is no longer holding his arm. 

He knows exactly what he needs to do.


End file.
